Journal Article

Spatial, occupational, and age-related effects on reported variation in colloquial German

Niehaus, Konstantin, Möller, Robert, Elspaß, Stephan, Pickl, Simon, Wirtz, Mason A.

2024

Overview

While dialectal variation is often investigated from a geographical angle, there exists substantial variation both within the community and individual. The aim of the present article is to investigate the extent to which spatial, occupational, and age-related factors are associated with the diversity of linguistic variants reported per informant at a given locality. Drawing on colloquial language data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache ‘Atlas of Colloquial German,’ we found that informants from southeastern Germany and Austria reported familiarity with more variants. Moreover, we multifactorially operationalize occupational complexity, a variable that can capture the effects of different communicative, technical, and physical skills required in a job (via the Dictionary of Occupational Titles). Bayesian multilevel modeling revealed that informants in occupations involving physical precision work and communicative complexity reported less familiarity with variants, and that younger informants were familiar with a wider range of variants.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Age / Age differences / Age effects / age-related effects / Arts & humanities / Arts & sciences humaines / Bayesian analysis / Careers / Colloquial language / Dialects / Education / Familiarity / Generational differences / German language / Information sources / Language and Linguistics / Language varieties / Languages & linguistics / Langues & linguistique / Linguistic atlases / Linguistics / Linguistics and Language / Locality / occupational complexity / Occupations / Respondents / Sociolinguistics / spatial autocorrelation / Variables / Variants / variationist sociolinguistics / Work skills / Working class